Kevin Hochman mingled among the attendees at a dinner on the last night of a meeting for Chili’s district managers in Coronado, California, last month, chatting with everyone from the woman serving wine at the Il Fornaio restaurant to his fellow executives, when Doug Brooks grabbed a microphone and started the evening’s toast.
Well, “toast” is one way of putting it. Brooks, the legendary former CEO of Chili’s owner Brinker International, held court for 19 minutes, providing a lesson on the history of casual dining and Brinker. He noted that both Chili’s and Maggiano’s could have easily had a history more akin to bygone chains like Stuart Anderson’s Steakhouse or Howard Johnson’s, or perhaps like Steak & Ale or Ponderosa and Bonanza. Had just a few things worked out differently, he said, “We wouldn’t be here celebrating the greatest turnaround in restaurant industry history.”
Brooks listed the major events that kept that from happening, including the time when Norman Brinker left Pillsbury to take on a deeply-in-debt, 23-unit Chili’s in the 1980s, or when Maggiano’s came into the fold in 1995. He added to that list the arrival of Hochman as Brinker International CEO two and a half years ago, earning a loud and long cheer from the crowd of “Chiliheads.”
It’s safe to say the mood these days throughout the Chili’s system is a good one, which is exactly what happens when a chain completely changes the restaurant business equation.
Chili’s completed a year in which its sales and consumer enthusiasm only appeared to build over time, ending the year with 31% same-store sales growth in the fourth quarter. Chili’s had never done that. And it wasn’t cheap, either: The chain’s same-store sales have increased every quarter since the pandemic.
Average unit volumes increased 16% last year alone. The stock price is up 380% since Hochman took over. Maybe more importantly, the brand is “cool again,” luring Gen Z customers with the chain’s social media-friendly cheese pulls, burger offerings and margaritas. It’s also inspired an industry to rethink value, focusing on the quality and service customers are getting for their money, rather than just pricing everything cheap and hoping people come in the door.
Yet let’s get real here: This is all just so shocking. Nobody—nobody—expected this. If they say they did, they’re lying. It’s one thing for a Raising Cane’s or Wingstop or Cava to do a 30%-plus same-store sales figure, but this is Chili’s we’re talking about here. We haven’t talked about Chili’s this much since we were all at the mall listening to the latest Tiffany tape on our $99 Sony Walkmans.
“I thought casual dining was dead and gone,” former Yum Brands CEO Greg Creed said. He ran Yum’s Taco Bell for years and guided it into the brand it is today. And yet, he said, “I’ve never delivered a plus-30. And this is in a category that I thought was dead.”
It’s certainly more than enough to have earned Hochman the title of Restaurant Business’ Restaurant Leader of the Year, an honor selected by the editors of Restaurant Business and celebrated at the Restaurant Leadership Conference, to be held April 13 to 16 in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Kevin Hochman doesn’t come across as your typical, public company CEO. If there is an ego, it’s difficult to find one—he admitted he was embarrassed to have received the award, for instance, and is perfectly willing to occupy the background while his lieutenants take center stage. He wears thick, dark-rimmed glasses and prefers quarter-zip pullovers to suits and ties. He has a penchant for self-depreciation. “He’s quirky,” Creed said.
Don’t let any of that fool you. Hochman doesn’t like complacency. And he is exceptionally confident in what he thinks is right. After more than a decade running restaurant chains, it’s difficult to argue with the results. After he took over as chief marketing officer for KFC U.S. in 2014, he had an idea to bring back Colonel Sanders as the centerpiece of the chain’s marketing.
Yet he had to get that idea past skeptical Yum Brands executives, notably then-CEO David Novak. KFC had used Colonel Sanders in ads in the past, to no avail. But Hochman was persistent, and believed in the idea, which would use a series of celebrities impersonating KFC’s famous founder. Even today, nearly a decade later, Hochman recalls exactly why he thought it would work.
“Young people distrust everything, right?” Hochman said. “They just distrust all advertising. So, here’s this character, and the whole joke was, ‘I’m here to sell you fried chicken. I’m a character.’ And then we’re going to lean into it and break the fourth wall.”
So, Hochman kept tweaking the idea, bringing it back to KFC leadership until it got the OK. And he was proven right. KFC U.S. didn’t report a single quarter of negative same-store sales from the first quarter of 2015 through mid-2019. And it wasn’t lost on multiple former Yum Brands executives that KFC has not been the same domestically since Hochman left.
The story also taught Hochman a key lesson. Take risks. But be prepared. “You can take risks if you’re a young person, but you need to make sure you’ve got Plan B and Plan C covered so your leadership can support you and have your back,” he said. “(Novak) may not agree with the direction, but he had our back because we showed him that we prepared.”
Hochman is an avid runner and tennis player. But he is at his best in the kitchen. When he has dinner parties, which he and his wife, Ann, love to host, he spends most of his time working on the meal. Ann is the one who is out front. “You might not actually talk to him a lot at those dinner parties, because he’s usually in the kitchen and he’s got a set schedule and it’s a multi-course meal and he’s usually the one doing the majority of the work,” Chili’s CMO George Felix said.
That included his 50th birthday party. While Hochman at this point of his career can certainly afford a chef or a caterer, he instead invited a select group of friends from around the country and prepared a selection of items unique to them.
It’s a trait he learned from his mother, Zella Hochman. Kevin Hochman grew up in Miami, the youngest of three children, and his mother was a big influence. “She lived to serve others,” Hochman said. “She loved having friends over. She loved when we had friends over. She wanted to make them feel special.”
She died last June. The following month, Chili’s had its annual conference for general managers. The chain’s loyal employees are known as “Chiliheads.”
“It seems like a silly name, Chilihead, and I thought it was silly when I first heard it,” Hochman said. “I really understand what it is now. Chilheads are people who love to serve others. They don’t take themselves too seriously. We’re just serving beer, Southwest Eggrolls and burgers. They love to serve each other, too. Not just serve the guests.
“They like that. They call it ‘shift happens,’ and ‘let’s play a restaurant.’ The idea that, your restaurant’s busy, you get slammed, and then you make it out, and you’ve delighted a lot of guests, and you’ve done it as a team. That’s the ideal for a Chilihead. I told the general managers: I think my mom was a Chilihead, even though she’s never worked at Chili’s. It really dawned on me, why I like working at this company so much. As silly as the name is, I’m a Chilihead.”
Hochman worked alongside numerous people at Procter & Gamble who would go on to be top executives elsewhere. | Photo by Terri Glanger
Hochman cut his teeth at two companies that have served as training grounds for future restaurant executives: Yum Brands and Procter & Gamble.
He took an entry-level position as a cost forecaster in the Baltimore office of Procter & Gamble, which makes products like Tide, Dawn and Mr. Clean. That’s where he met Ann, who was a marketing intern at the time. Marketing is a big deal at the company, and marketing interns typically outrank entry-level finance people.
Ann was working on a prom promotion for a cosmetics brand. Hochman’s job was to provide the financial analysis. She expected it to take weeks. He got it done immediately. “I looked like a rock star,” she said. “He’s really efficient.”
Ann knew immediately he would be successful. “It was always obvious to me he was the smartest guy in the room,” Ann said.
There appears to be some disagreement, however, as to Hochman’s work as a cost forecaster. “I was terrible,” he said.
But another executive with Procter & Gamble, Todd Magazine, saw Hochman’s potential, brought him over to marketing and took him under his wing. That would be a key moment for Hochman, because sponsorship from a marketing leader is how Procter & Gamble employees could make their way over to that department.
That was where Hochman worked on the rebranding of Old Spice deodorant in 2010. The brand at the time was known mostly for older men. But the company overhauled its identity, starting with a series of video ads repositioning the deodorant for a younger generation. The campaign, from Wieden + Kennedy, would be a huge success and drove sales for the brand. Wieden would go on to do the KFC Colonel campaign.
“It’s not that different from the KFC transformation,” said Esi Eggleston Bracey, who worked with Hochman at Procter & Gamble and is now the chief growth and marketing officer with Unilever. “How do you take outdated Old Spice and make it relevant again?”
Hochman worked alongside numerous people at Procter & Gamble who would go on to be top executives elsewhere, including Bracey, George Felix, Sonic President Jim Taylor, Arby’s President David Graves, Shake Shack CEO Rob Lynch and Brian Niccol from Starbucks. Niccol left Procter & Gamble to take a job with Taco Bell and told Hochman about a job at the chain’s international division.
Hochman ended up interviewing with David Novak about a job overseeing marketing at one of Yum’s U.S. chains. Novak asked him whether he’d prefer working at Taco Bell or KFC. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t think I want to do Taco Bell because they’re doing so well and all you could do was mess it up,’” Hochman said. “I don’t love just being given a playbook and running it. The KFC brand seems like it should be doing a lot better. It’s got the Colonel. It’s got fried chicken. Everybody’s grown up on it.”
That’s how Hochman ended up at Yum Brands, itself an executive incubator. Some 30 people who worked under Novak have gone onto become CEO of other companies.
The company taught Hochman a lot, particularly about people culture. Yum had a strong culture of recognition under Novak, who would recognize top employees with a rubber chicken. Executives throughout the company did something similar, including Hochman, who would give out pictures of top employees as Colonel Sanders.
“David Novak taught me about the importance of bringing people along, and the importance of great communication and leadership and envisioning and encouraging people and then making them feel recognized for a great job,” Hochman said.
Hochman is quick to recognize people for their role in his career. Creed, who succeeded Novak as Yum CEO, for teaching him about branding. Bracey taught him about “commercial aggressiveness.” And then there is his executive mentor, Dave Goebel, the former CEO of Applebee’s. “He taught me how to be a CEO,” Hochman said. “I’d never been a public company CEO. I knew a lot about marketing. I knew a little bit about operations. I didn’t know how to do all this other stuff.”
In August 2022, three months after he was recruited to be the Brinker CEO, Hochman stood before 1,200 Chili’s general managers at the company’s annual conference and made a bold proclamation.
Hochman posted a mock cover of Inc. Magazine, dated August 2025. It featured a Chili’s storefront and this cover line: “Chili’s is back baby! How Chili’s restaurant teams led the charge to return it to winning.”
“This cover has not been written yet,” Hochman told them. “It will be written a few years from now and it will tell the story of how you, our restaurant leaders, drove the ideas and the execution that made working at a Chili’s easier, more fun and more rewarding. And returned our brand to greatness.”
In hindsight, the proclamation was conservative. But it’s difficult to fully appreciate how bold it was at the time. Chili’s had closed more locations than it opened every year but one since 2009. Average unit volumes grew in 2021, to $2.9 million, and the company was seemingly recovering from the pandemic, but it was still lower than it was in 2008. Had Chili’s simply kept pace with inflation, it’d be $4.5 million, nearly 60% higher.
And it was doing better than most of its casual-dining compatriots. Two of the four big bar-and-grill chains from the '90s and early 2000s era, TGI Fridays and Ruby Tuesday, have filed for bankruptcy. Applebee’s, Chili’s longtime rival, has now had seven straight same-store sales declines. Its sales were also struggling before the pandemic.
Chili’s coming out of the pandemic was dabbling in several then-trendy recovery strategies. The company started using virtual brands out of its kitchens to take advantage of excess capacity and generate sales. It also started testing robot servers.
Hochman got rid of the servers shortly after he arrived and today jokes that there are 60 sitting in a warehouse. “Want to buy them?” he asked. The company has also stopped using virtual brands, though it still operates its It’s Just Wings concept. Chili’s general managers seem relieved, noting that virtual brands required companies to buy new ingredients and made matters complicated inside the kitchen, especially given the unpredictability of many of the orders.
The point of the mock magazine cover was to set a vision. That, Hochman said, is his role at Brinker. “The point of that was leadership,” he said. “I listened to the teams for three months. I understood what we needed to do. And my job as the leader of the company was to envision where we’re going to go, so they could see where they were.”
Hochman’s leadership style would take other forms, or disguises, as it were. On International Week of Happiness at Work last year, for instance, Hochman wore a Willy Wonka costume at Brinker’s offices. Felix and Chief Legal Officer Dan Fuller wore Oompa Loompa costumes and they walked around handing Brinker-branded M&Ms to employees. “He’ll put on a NASCAR fire suit in a moment’s notice,” Felix said. “He loves doing that. Kevin does not take himself too seriously. I think that’s one of the reasons people love him.”
He also has “Kevinisms,” metaphors or sayings to help describe strategies. There’s “Mama Hochman simple,” or making something simple enough that his mother could understand it.
That’s one of Hochman’s key strengths. As Doug Brooks noted, Hochman has a way of making complicated ideas simple, so everybody can understand them, which helps get everybody behind the ideas.
“It’s not an easy business we’re in,” said Aaron White, Brinker’s chief people officer. “He has really helped us simplify that.”
Another Kevinism: Big dogs have big puppies. Little tweaks and changes don’t move the needle. Companies should spend more time innovating and developing, which yields bigger results. “That’s where you want to spend your time, because that big dog’s probably going to have a big puppy,” Felix said.
Willy Wonka Kevin Hochman, middle, between Oompa Loompas George Felix (left) and Dan Fuller. | Photo courtesy of Brinker Intl.
Much in the way that Hochman said he would prefer KFC to Taco Bell, he saw potential in Chili’s. During his KFC years, the Hochman family frequented Texas Roadhouse locations. He knew that people would visit casual-dining restaurants, if they could just get what they wanted out of the experience.
Yet it also required work, even if it meant destroying sacred cows. So, under Hochman, the company has focused on those big dogs to get people back to the brand. The company has cut much of the menu, including 13 items in the first half of the current fiscal year alone. Among the menu cuts: Chili. That’s right: Chili’s doesn’t serve chili.
Chili’s has centered its menu on a small handful of items, including burgers, fajitas, margaritas and chicken tenders. The chain removed repetitive ingredients and is focused on improving its core items. The company has upgraded its burgers, margaritas and chicken. Fajitas are next on the list for improvement. Next comes a fifth core item, ribs.
But the company also focused on the condition of its restaurants. Hochman visited 20 markets his first year on the job, listening to employees and taking stock of the way the business was operated. These days, he does about 15 visits a year. On the second day of each visit is a listening session featuring about 15 to 20 local area managers, who bring him complaints and suggestions.
In one recent session, for instance, the managers noted that, when an order for a side of broccoli comes in, it appears on every screen in the kitchen, a legacy of changes made during the pandemic. So, the order for broccoli will come to the screen for the fry station, which doesn’t make the broccoli, and which can make life confusing for kitchen workers. Now it just appears on the screen in the kitchen zone responsible for broccoli. “It just saves a ton of time and energy on these managers,” Hochman said.
The big difference between Chili’s and KFC, besides the service format and the menu, is the ownership structure. All but about 100 of Chili’s 1,200 restaurants are company-operated, which enables Brinker to deploy changes more quickly. But Hochman was also surprised at just how little operations played a role in the company’s decision-making.
“I thought operations would have a big seat at the table,” he said. “They’re closest to the customer, and if we don’t listen to them, how are we going to design plans that work?”
Hochman may be a marketing guy. But he understands one of the most important ideas in the restaurant business: It’s one thing to get customers to your restaurant. It’s another thing to keep them there. That focus on operations would prove vital in 2024, when Chili’s would get the benefit of a remarkable social media campaign.
It started in the spring, when many customers started looking at Chili’s 3 for Me promotion, which includes a main such as a burger, a starter such as chips and a drink. The lowest price was $10.99. And some on social media began comparing it positively to prices at McDonald’s, which had soared coming out of the pandemic. Chili’s doubled down on the idea with a Big Mac-like Big Smasher Burger, featuring Thousand Island dressing, red onions, pickles and lettuce.
In April, another viral moment, the "cheese pull," led to surging sales of fried mozzarella sticks, part of the chain's Triple Dipper appetizer, as customers showed videos of themselves pulling the cheese as they took a bite. The company backed it with a social media campaign and television ads. The social media moment only built as the year progressed. By the end of 2024, the Triple Dipper represented 14% of Chili’s total sales.
Hochman is realistic about the role of social media. “There’s obviously some luck involved,” he said. But he also points out that most viral restaurant trends last a few weeks. This one has lasted months, and the company’s performance has only improved.
The whole point of the thing, then, is preparation. Chili’s has focused on operations for most of the past three years, doing things like allowing managers to add labor back into restaurants to ensure customers are served the right way. If four bussers are needed on a Friday, rather than three, so be it.
When the social media campaign caught fire, the people in the restaurants, those folks Hochman spent so long listening to, were ready for the rush. So, the customers coming in just to pull some cheese would get a good experience, making them more likely to return. “There was some opportunity there with the cheese pull,” Hochman said. “But we were prepared for the volume.”
Chili’s isn’t done, of course. In February, the company behind Felix created a Lifetime movie, “I’ll be Home for National Margarita Day,” featuring Maria Menounos and Taye Diggs. And Chili’s sister chain, the Italian concept Maggiano’s Little Italy, is now adopting many of the same strategies as Chili’s did as it works on a comeback of its own.
And it’s not just Chili’s. Other brands are taking pages from the brand’s playbook, such as BJ’s Restaurants, and are having some success in helping the U.S. consumer rediscover casual dining.
Hochman is now tapping into Brinker’s history. Doug Brooks is again a fixture in the office and holds court during company events.
In 2019, Brinker moved its headquarters to a new, 200,000-square-foot facility, leaving behind the offices it had called home since the 1980s. When it made the move, only a few pieces of memorabilia from Chili’s early days were brought along. They all occupy a wall in a meeting room, including early drink coasters, buttons, old uniforms and photos.
The rest was given away. Hochman said the company is trying to recover the rest of it.
There is nothing wrong, after all, with a little pride in the history of Chili’s. Especially now.
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